The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical: Revised and Supplemented Edition

by Ernst Mach

Insisting that sensation constitutes the data for all science, physical and psychological, Mach articulated an early form of scientific positivism that provided Külpe and Titchener with an epistemological framework for their emerging views. Conceiving of space and time not as Kantian categories but as the immediate data of experience, Mach also helped lay the groundwork for the Gestaltists' later recognition of the phenomenal status of extension and duration.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Psychology, Nonfiction, Physics

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1914

About the author

Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher and is the namesake for the "Mach number" (also known as Mach speed) and the optical illusion known as Mach bands.

Reviews

[saml · Rating 2 out of 5]

odd book. strangely organised, scrappy. occasionally wonderful to read, as mach's interest in so much of the world draws one through all the reams of antique trivia. mach has wonderful philosophical views, but he is not interested in treating them as philosophy, really, so the book is of little philosophical interest. the strangest thing about the volume is its introduction, which is almost solely devoted to consideration of mach's relation to freud

[Éric Loonis]

This text by Ernst Mach was impossible to find in French edition (except as used book at prohibitive prices), so I started to retranslate it and offer it to interested readers. Of course, it is aimed at an intellectual, scientific audience, even simply passionate about reflection on the relationship between the world, the body and the mind. I had a lot of fun translating the text of a great scientist and discovering his thoughts.